The English Opium Eater by Robert Morrison: review

As The English Opium Eater shows, Thomas De Quincey’s addictions encompassed
more than just the drug,
says Jonathan Bate

By Jonathan Bate

6:00AM GMT 13 Dec 2009

'It was available everywhere,’ Robert Morrison reminds us, 'chemists and pharmacists sold it, as did bakers, grocers, publicans, tailors, rent collectors and street vendors.’ Serious users debated the merits of their favourite proprietary brands: Batley’s Sedative Solution, Godfey’s Cordial, Mother Bailey’s Quieting Spirit, McMunn’s Elixir, Dalby’s Carminative and the potent Kendal Black Drop, craved by Coleridge. For centuries it had been the most effective painkiller known to man, derived from the milky sap of the unripe seedpod of the poppy. Opium. Romance is still attached to the name: dens of indulgence, mysterious Chinese dealers, dreams of Kubla Khan.

By the end of the 19th century, morphine, its principal active agent, had been isolated. The invention of the hypodermic syringe had eased delivery and we were on the road to Sherlock Holmes’s heroin addiction. But Thomas De Quincey, whose Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, published in 1821, did more than any other book to create the romance of the drug, relied on a tincture. The opium was dissolved in alcohol, usually brandy.

Like his revered Samuel Taylor Coleridge, De Quincey was strictly speaking, a laudanum drinker rather than an opium eater, in all probability a double addict, alcoholic as well as junkie.

A very good biography of De Quincey was published by the poet Grevel Lindop nearly 30 years ago. Since then, there has been a definitive edition of his complete works and a wealth of letters have been unearthed. The time was ripe for a new biography and Morrison has done his man proud.

This is an exceptionally well-balanced account. The Confessions are centre-stage, as they have to be, but they are not allowed to overwhelm the range of De Quincey’s other writings: his memoirs of Wordsworth and Coleridge, which did so much to establish the cult of the Lake Poets, his ingenious essays on such subjects as the English Mail Coach (De Quincey loved speed) and the decline of the art of the English Murder, even his now forgotten writings on economics. Morrison manages to share with the reader his admiration and affection for his subject, while at the same time showing that he was a bit, how shall we say, odd. And very selfish – even before he became a drug addict.

De Quincey was one of the first great autobiographers. The telling of one’s own life story is a notoriously unreliable literary genre. In order to turn your life into something resembling a novel, you have to dramatise it, to alight on certain key moments that will give a shaping structure to your story. For De Quincey, these involved death and salvation. When he was six, his beloved sister Elizabeth died and he was traumatised for life. It was like the loss of his own 'second self’. But, as Morrison points out, we don’t really know how traumatised he was at the time. He may have invested the event with high significance in the act of remembering and writing about it.

So too with his next big drama. De Quincey dropped out of Oxford and became a rough sleeper in London. He tells of how he collapsed in the street and was on the point of death, only to be rescued by a kind-hearted prostitute called Ann. They shack up together for a while, orphans in the storm. Then he goes out of town in pursuit of some possible work. They agree to meet on the corner of Great Titchfield Street upon his return. Needless to say, she isn’t there at the appointed time. He asks all the other prostitutes where she might be. He makes inquiries wherever he can, although it’s difficult since he never bothered to ask Ann her surname. It is as if she has vanished off the face of the earth.

Thus she becomes another of his lost girls, just like sister Elizabeth. But we can’t be sure that she ever really existed. Morrison wonders whether 'Ann’ might be a composite of various different prostitutes, since there is no doubt that De Quincey did consort with their kind during his years on the streets.

The discovery of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads provided him with as great an epiphany as that of opium. Wordsworth’s 'We are Seven’, a poem about a dead sibling, had particular resonance. De Quincey did nothing by halves. It wasn’t enough to send a fan letter. He moved to Grasmere, fell half in love with Wordsworth’s sister Dorothy and became obsessed with his infant daughter Catherine, lying night after night on her grave after she died and broke all their hearts. He moved into Dove Cottage when the Wordsworths upgraded to the more commodious Rydal Mount. For a poet of the common people, Wordsworth was a bit of a snob: he more or less disowned De Quincey on account of his marrying a local farmer’s daughter.

De Quincey lived on well into the Victorian era, but in the public imagination he always remained the opium eater. We can’t blame him for every aspect of the scourge of drugs today – it was only with criminalisation that the real problems began. But the words of the 1824 Family Oracle of Health remain salutary: 'Use of opium has been recently much increased by a wild, absurd, and romancing production called the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.

'We observe that at some late inquests this wicked book has been severely censured, as the source of misery and torment, and even of suicide itself, to those who have been seduced to take opium by its lying stories about celestial dreams, and similar nonsense.’